What does it mean to be “useful?” Although David Foster Wallace’s final work of fiction raises this question, it does not exactly answer it, and perhaps for good reason.
for this magazine), his former romantic partners , and his editors . These accounts filled in important blanks in Wallace’s personal history, including aspects of his decades-long battle with addiction and depression, and the grim details of his final weeks in California. They also produced a fairly consistent picture of a selfish friend, a manipulative—and likely abusive—boyfriend, and a jealous and self-mythologizing writer.
The transition, for Fogle and for the reader, is from seeing Fogle’s aimlessness as a generic product of adolescent apathy to understanding it as a symptom of a broader social and spiritual deficit. Wallace was an uncommonly philosophical novelist in part because he believed that cultural life was oriented by a set of dominant ideas and pictures, which were both older and more entrenched than any specific trend or technology.
On the level of narrative, all that is left is for Fogle to buy a wool suit and make his way to the I.R.S. regional recruiting office in southwest Chicago—a task that he completes in a subtly haunting scene set amid dazzlingly bright snowbanks left over from the infamous blizzard of 1979, and overlaid with heavy-handed comparisons between entering the Service and signing up for war.
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